How To Cheat At Cooking

The Queen of the kitchen has spoken and a grateful nation can breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

Delia Smith has written her first book for five years - already, we're told, a best-seller through pre-orders alone - and in it, she says it's OK to cut corners in the kitchen.

Yes, that's right: the woman who taught Britain how to boil an egg says it's all right to cheat, to use a few frozen ingredients or some ready-prepared bits and pieces

Named Delia's How To Cheat At Cooking, it looks like being one of those ground-breaking cookbooks that genuinely changes our whole attitude to food. For the new book is not simply a cheat's charter, it declares an end to food snobbery. And I, for one, am mightily relieved.

For there, sitting proudly on my kitchen shelf, are dozens of books telling me that when it comes to cooking I must perpetually seek perfection. Never mind the time or effort it takes, everything must be done from scratch and to the letter.

There's Marcus Wareing's How To Cook The Perfect..., Heston Blumenthal's In Search Of Perfection, not to mention his latest Further Adventures in the same vein.

Each advocates an obsessional approach to cooking that can test the skills and patience of the most confident domestic chef.

There's even a phrase for Blumenthal's microscopic attention to detail: "molecular gastronomy". And wonderful as it may be, the average home cook has about as much hope of mastering his techniques as they have of painting the Mona Lisa using felt-tip pens - as I know only too well.

I'm yet to recover from attempting Heston's perfect trifle which, in a moment of reckless experimentation, I decided would make a jolly alternative to our Christmas pudding last year.

After six hours, 53 ingredients and the best part of 100 spent, I produced a trifle that was nice enough, but scarcely an adequate return on the blood, sweat and tears that had gone into its construction. Delia would never inflict that kind of trauma on her readers.

Or how about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's book Meat, which urges us to discover all we can about the provenance of everything we roast, grill or fry.

So it's no longer enough to cook a steak without turning it to rubber. No, Hugh advocates finding out where the cow lived, what it ate, how long it travelled to the slaughterhouse, whether it was hung correctly, and doubtless what music was played at the moment of execution.

Delia offers us a sanctuary from much of this. According to her, it's fine to use Marigold vegetable stock powder if we haven't got time to make some from scratch.

There's no shame, she says, in using frozen mashed potato to top-off a Shepherd's pie or opening a jar of Italian tomato sauce to make a quick dish of Creole prawns. She even recommends using ready-grated cheese if we're too busy to do it ourselves - the ultimate lazy chef's short-cut.

You can almost hear the collective "Hallelujah!" emanating from the kitchens of Britain. For far too long, we have all been in the grip of a collective gastromania in which eating well was no longer a pleasure, it was a competitive sport.

The trend started with celebrity chefs using ever more complex techniques and unusual ingredients to justify their status (and prices).

Chefs in top restaurants worked themselves to near-death in their quest for those coveted

You may feel like lobster. You may even order lobster. But are you prepared for the moment when what actually arrives is a dish of Brittany blue lobster and veal sweetbread, carrot compote, vanilla emulsion and citrus?

There should be a law against this sort of thing - and Delia's surely the right person to get it through parliament. As Antony Worrall Thompson says: "If Delia were up for election, she'd be prime minister by now.

But of course, where the celebrity chefs ventured, domestic cooks soon aspired to follow. The result? Being a passionate foodie these past few years has been exhausting work.

For a start, you had to be ethical as well as have good taste buds. Could you be sure that your Arabica coffee bean was freshly roasted, let alone whether it had come from a Nicaraguan crop that was grown in certified organic conditions and was fairly traded - thus ensuring a decent wage for the labourers?

And what of the food miles your 70 per cent cocoa Cru Apurimac chocolate had travelled from its origins beside a river in Peru? Could your sweet tooth and gourmet sensibilities really be justified, given the carbon emissions that resulted from its transportation?

Yet was sourcing local food really any better? Even as we strove to support farmers' markets all was not as it seemed. For, word is, locally produced food can have a heavier carbon footprint than that of imported goods.

Think of the energy used to heat an Isle of White greenhouse to ripen tomatoes, or the fuel used by a small van to take a few veg to a nearby town, when a supermarket HGV would transport food from afar far more efficiently?

Oh, the anxieties have been endless.

But now, relief is at hand. If Delia says it's OK to cheat, then we can cast aside some of these ludicrous obsessions and get back to the simple business of cooking half-decent food for our friends and families.

For at the heart of being a good cook is the passion to give pleasure to one's guests - a truism that has been lost amid all the fuss and nonsense we've been dishing up lately. Such has been the pressure for the host to do the right thing - to ensure that the tannins in the Shiraz didn't clash with the acidity of the slow-braised Balsamic infused free-range duck, and so on - that it's no wonder the dinner party has become a dying trend.

Yes, it helps if the food is halfedible. But genuine hospitality is more about creating a good atmosphere than a culinary masterpiece. Your guests just want to be fed (and if you're me, fed on time).

Thankfully Delia's glorious reemergence from self-imposed exile means that everyone who thought they were afraid to cook - that they weren't good enough, or didn't have the time or would be mocked for their reliance on cheats' ingredients - can now pick up a saucepan again.

I've only one minor niggle, before Delia is nominated for sainthood. She advocates using Aunt Bessie's Homestyle frozen crispy roast potatoes as a short-cut.

Well, I'm sure Aunt Bessie's are fine, but just in case you're thinking of asking me round for Sunday lunch, I do prefer mine made from freshly dug King Edwards, boiled for ten minutes, shaken heavily once in a saucepan with plain flour, then poured on to hot goose fat and roasted in the top oven of an Aga for 75 minutes.

There's cheating... and there's getting it right, as well.

William Sitwell is the editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated. Read Delia's new recipes exclusively in Weekend magazine, free with the Mail this Saturday.